Prices of SSDs Will Get Closer to Hard Drives in Three to Five Years – Chief Executive of OCZ

Chief executive officer of OCZ Technology Group, a leading supplier of DRAM- and flash-based products, said that in five years from now the price per gigabyte of solid-state drives (SSDs) will almost match the price per gigabyte of hard disk drives (HDDs).

At present SSDs are used in conjunction with hard drives in order to reduce boot-up time and accelerate performance of frequently used programs. However, that is going to change in the future as the price of flash will get closer to that of hard drives in terms of per gigabyte cost.

“This dual usage pairing an SSD as a boot drive with a HDD for mass storage will persist during the transition period, but as you move three to five years out the prices per gigabyte for SSDs will continue to get closer. As the delta decreases, adoption of SSDs will only increase and we will definitely see this transition in PCs,” said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology, in a brief interview with X-bit labs.

The cost of flash memory will continue to decrease going forward, despite the recent trends that drew increase of NAND flash cost. Moreover, even though the price of actual chips may go up, the price per gigabyte will decrease, claims the head of OCZ.

“The fabs may very well continue to drive down the market price of flash per gigabyte and if that continues then it will benefit OCZ's ability to offer larger drives for lower prices which ultimately benefits the end users. The bottom line is we want to deliver the best TCO (total cost of ownership) to clients,” added Mr. Petersen.

Eli Harari, chief executive officer of SanDisk, one of the world’s largest suppliers of flash-based products, said earlier this year that as the price of NAND flash decreases, memory manufacturers will slowdown their investments into newer production facilities. As a consequence, once the overall demand towards flash increases sometime in 2011 – 2013, there will be shortages of flash memory. Nevertheless, Ryan Petersen is more optimistic than his colleague.

“Flash movement is hard to predict and it is hard to say what will happen between now and the end of next year. There are sure to be the usual issues including limited shortages followed by oversupply. While we are looking for NAND prices to drop on a price per GB basis, we have not seen in the last decade prices increase on the level we are seeing now, these recent changes are primarily driven by process technology shrinks and wafer size increases,” stressed Mr. Petersen.